Nothing Left
by redseeker
Summary: History repeats itself... Ten years after the end of the war, the dissolution of the Hellsing Organisation, and the death of its director, Seras Victoria revisits the Hellsing mansion, and discovers the monster hidden beneath. AxS, AUish.
1. Monster

She leaned her forehead against the window. The glass was even cooler than her skin, and was soothing to the touch. Outside, fat droplets of rain splattered against the glass and created a blanket of sound as they hit the brick and foliage of the garden below, a dull drumming under which all other noise was dampened. The sky was a murky watercolour, the different shades of grey running together in windswept chaos.

She lifted her eyes and gazed balefully out. The rich red of her irises provided two of the few points of colour in the room, which was richly furnished but bathed in grey shadow and dust. The place had been neglected for nearly a decade now, the historic building allowed to crumble and its many treasures - and secrets - hidden from the world that might exploit them.

With a sigh of air that failed to even cloud the cold pane, Seras Victoria straightened and turned away from the window. Her blank eyes surveyed the room's contents - the eerie portraits upon the walls of masters long since dead, the sideboards filled with crystal glasses and other trinkets, the vast oak desk, still littered with papers, veiled with the dust of ten years. She moved closer, her curiosity captured by the evidence of a life lived seemingly such a short time ago. There were still envelopes left unopened on the top of one pile.

Feeling as though she were somehow trespassing, she took a seat in the high-backed chair. She ran her fingertips over a few of the papers. They whispered as her touch ghosted over them, and she felt what could only be an echo of this chair's last occupant. The image of a blonde haired woman, the sense of her commanding presence, and a feeling… the weight of a final decision. Seras frowned, and drew her hand away.

"Underground…" she murmured. It was just a notion, but in recent years she had come to trust her limited telepathic abilities, rather than try to shut them out. There was a monster in the cellar, she simply knew it.

Leaving the study behind, Seras moved swiftly through the house and descended into the subterranean labyrinth that was the Hellsing mansion's dungeons and underground research facility, long disused. She wandered, mindlessly choosing one path or the other whenever her route forked. She knew the correct chamber when she saw it.

The door was a black portal set deep in the rough stone wall, scrawled over with red paint. The sigil was familiar, and sent a peculiar, warm thrill through her. To her heightened senses the place reeked of decay and, beneath that, old, dry blood. Approaching the door with tentative steps, she raised one gloved hand to the handle. As her fingers touched the flaking metal another image rose unbidden in her mind: a young girl, her hair long and pale, her expression resolute, a mask to cover her cold fear, standing in this same place many years before… and on the other side of the door, something stirring. Something so alien to that girl, yet so very familiar to the woman who now stood in her place. A monster locked in the dungeon, with blood that she shared.

Her throat dry, her grip firm, Seras pushed the handle down and let the door creak open. It swung easily, despite its weight and age, though the sound of its weary hinges was loud in the empty, echoing darkness. Her eyes searched the thick shadow ahead of her. The blackness eased, and revealed a short staircase descending to the chamber's dank floor, the ceiling's low beams, and a figure hunched against the far wall. From this distance it could have been a trick of the eye, the way the shadows fell to make that hunkered shape look human, to give the impression of a face with emaciated, corpse-like features. However, the smell told her all she needed to know, the one layered beneath the reek of decay. She could have recognised it anywhere: blood, coppery and rich and old, mixed with some indefinable, musky scent.

She had no reason to be afraid. The monster was weakened and bound, ten dry years having robbed him of much of his power, while she, in that time, had only grown stronger. With each step into the damp, sour-smelling chamber her gait became more assured, more eager.

"Master…?" she breathed.

He should have died ten years ago. Seras had thought he had. After the dissolution of the Organisation, she had gone it alone, and had somehow managed to stay out of the sights of the institutions and individuals who still made it their business to hunt and slay her kind. She had thought that he had gone the same way as his master…

She felt compelled to keep her voice low, as though the years of silence would object to being disrupted - as though he were simply sleeping, and she dare not wake him. As she drew closer, however, she could clearly see that it was no ordinary sleep that kept him motionless. No eerie smile curved his lips in an echo of whatever dreams a mind like his might produce. Instead, his mouth was a parched, papery crease in a dried out face, his body a husk. The hair hung limp and lustreless, more grey than black. The bindings that held him secured to the wall seemed flimsy to her eyes. He should have been able to break them with ease.

"Master…" Her face twisted into a mask of pity and disbelief. Could this truly be the same creature who had made her what she was, who had been so invincible?

She tried to reach him with her mind. At first it was as though he wasn't even there - he had sealed himself off from the outside world, in a dormant state that, she assumed, allowed him to continue to exist for so long without sustenance. After a moment's persistence, she thought she felt something give, felt something she recognised.

Pulling off her gloves, she knelt at the corpse's side and hesitantly touched his face. His skin was dead and dry, though still she closed her eyes and tried to reach him again, attempting to find some scrap of consciousness within that dead shell.

"_Master… Do you remember me? It's been ten years, but what's a decade to us?_" She waited, and was about to pull back, when a voice resounded in her head, a voice she hadn't heard in ten long, lonely years.

"_Police girl?"_

Her eyes opened wide, and a smile broke across her face. "Master!" she spoke aloud, forgetting herself. "You _are _alive!"

"_Of course not,_" came his reply, accompanied by an unspoken feeling of mild contempt. "_What do you think?"_

"You look like hell…" Instead of the anger she expected, he sent her a vague sense of amusement.

"_My body is weak, police girl, but can be restored… What are you doing here?_"

Disheartened, Seras frowned and drew back. "I thought you'd be happy to see me."

"_And why is that?_"

"Don't you want to get out of here?" She was met with silence. "Well, don't you?"

A long pause. "_I am tired…"_

Seras frowned. "Master… You've been here too long. Creatures like us, we're not meant to be locked up. Don't you want to be free again?" She tried to remember the words he had used, so many years ago, when trying to coax her to drink. "To… to walk the night under your own will?" She felt silly saying it, but thought she sensed a softening in his resolution.

After several moment's thought, Seras extended her left forearm, dipped her head, and brought the points of her fangs into contact with the white skin of her wrist. If she knew her master at all, she knew that there was only one thing that could grasp his attention. She bit straight down, then tore to leave a long, deep wound. It hurt, but she swallowed down the flesh and sat up, her lips bloody, the gash on her wrist large and raw. She watched the blood brim up within it. It was a while since she'd fed, so the flow was sluggish, the blood cold.

"I'll wake you up…" she said, half to herself. She could already sense his hunger. "You must be thirsty." She raised her arm.

"_What do you hope to achieve from this?_" Seras ignored him and gently pressed the cut against his parched lips.

"Maybe I'm just being selfish..." A drop of dark red slipped coldly over her arm and fell, dripping with a wet sound onto Alucard's leather. At first he stayed as motionless as the corpse he imitated. After several seconds, however, she felt the dry tip of a tongue begin to push and lap at the wound. "I don't want to carry on by myself."

More of her blood trickled out of her, between his now parted lips, and it was with a strange kind of satisfaction that she felt him move and, following his instinct, bite. His teeth punctured the skin on either side of the cut, and his tongue pushed into the wound. Seras felt light-headed as he sucked more blood out of her, a weakness she hadn't felt in years rushing up, and her ears began to sing. She bit her lip and knelt astride him, her free hand gripping the folds of leather at Alucard's shoulder. He was pulling the life out of her with more force now, and she noticed hazily that his hair was blacker, his flesh fuller, as her blood revived him. She glanced down at his face, and in that moment his eyes opened. They glowed in the shadow, a stark red against the white of his skin and the coiling black of his hair.

"Master…" She tried to pull her arm away from him. He held fast and increased the pressure of his bite, her flesh crunching beneath his jaws. "Ah, Master…!" With a great effort she pulled her arm free in one wrenching movement. He growled and attempted to regain his hold, jaws snapping. She bared her teeth in response, and clutched her wounded arm to her chest.

His head lowered, the thick curtain of his hair falling over his face. When he looked up again his expression was more restrained, more human, though the blood on his lips and teeth and chin betrayed him for a fiend.

"You need to leave me _some_ ," Seras said. Her arm had already begun to heal, though she still felt weakened - her power, as with that of any un-dead, lay in her blood. Drain that from her and she was as weak as any human, any corpse. He grinned, baring red slicked teeth. Seras made a decision, and leaned forward. Moving swiftly, she licked some blood from the corner of his mouth in an echo of his own movement, that first night they met. She felt him tense slightly, maybe in surprise. Then it was he who caught her off-guard, quickly moving his head as to catch her mouth with his, pushing his tongue past her teeth and growling low in his throat. She yielded to him, and brought her hands up to knother fingers in his hair. She shifted her weight, bringing their bodies into closer contact.

When she pulled back, her head was still swimming, though not from blood loss alone. "Are you going to free yourself...?"

"Perhaps," he replied. He slowly licked some of the blood from his lips and teeth. "I've been chained here for so many years. What's a little longer?" He bucked, jolting her forward, and into another bloody kiss. Outside, the night crept in. The rain continued to fall. The shadows in the dungeon crept back, and the two monsters stayed, twined together in the darkness.


	2. Vampire

_I'm alive in uterine  
a star in the dark, a new day has dawned  
open up and let it flow  
I'll make it yours so here we go..._

It felt odd, leaving that dank chamber again, slowly climbing the shallow stone stairs with a step so much lighter than that with which she had descended.

"It hasn't changed much up there," Seras said, pausing to glance back over her shoulder once she was a few steps into the dark hallway. "It's almost as though no time's passed at all."

His gaze flicked around the hallway briefly before returning to her, and he stepped through the door after only the slightest hesitation.

"Everything has changed, though," he said. He glanced down at his gloves; the printed seal stood out as clearly as ever on the dusty white fabric, yet she could tell from his face that something was amiss. "My master…"

Seras simply studied him for a moment. He seemed to be finally letting the memories of those battles over a decade ago flood back to him. The un-dead armies, the bloodshed, and carnage, and death. Too many had died in that conflict, the last and perhaps best of all being his master, Sir Integral. Seras remembered it only vaguely; she regretted that. She knew it was the sort of thing one should remember so clearly, an event that should be seared onto one's memory in photographic detail and retained forever.

She had gone down fighting, Seras knew that. It was only fitting for such a woman as Integral Hellsing.

"You remember…?" she asked softly. He looked up. His expression was curiously blank, and he nodded.

"I do," he replied. His shoulders slumped a little as he relaxed. "Everything has changed."

"Yeah," Seras answered. She wasn't sure what else to say. "The seals…"

"They're broken now," he finished for her, confirming what she had believed. "If they were not, I would still be trapped in that cell." She watched him intently for a moment, before taking a few steps closer to him. He looked up at her again. "You've changed," he commented, as though continuing from his earlier line of thought.

She smiled. "Well, yes," she replied. "It has been ten years, after all."

"But what's a decade to us?" he said, echoing her earlier words with a crooked smile.

Seras laughed. "You know, I haven't changed all that much," she said, scratching her head and smiling self-consciously.

He shook his head, moving closer. "I can feel it," he said. He brought one gloved hand to the back of her neck and looked down at her, the hint of a smile still on his lips. "I can taste it." Seras felt herself blush, the little blood he had left her rushing to her cheeks. He laughed softly and leaned down to press his lips to hers. This time his kiss was slow, lazy even, and Seras felt herself weaken. She pressed one hand to his chest, her fingers curling until she was gripping a handful of the stiff leather. When at last he pulled back, she simply closed her eyes, savouring the moment.

"I thought you had died," she said eventually, her voice low. He didn't reply, but gave her a mental prod that felt like a question. "After she died… I couldn't find you. I got lost in the battle, and when everyone was dead, you weren't there."

"I apologise," he said slowly.

She looked up at him. "What happened to you?"

But he only shook his head. "That can wait."

"Wait for wh- Oh!" She was cut off as he leaned in and kissed her again, pushing her until her back hit the wall. He gave a low, hungry growl, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and answered with a breathy mewl of her own. She pushed her body against his until they were as close as they could be, and gave a small yelp of surprise when he slid a hand over her hip to gently grip her thigh, pulling her leg up so that she could easily wrap it around his hips.

"Master…" she purred as he once again moved his kisses lower. The contact spoke not of love, but of simply, fiery need. Her whole body arched, her head tilting back, redundant breaths hitching in her throat.

She let her head roll to the side as he began to suck at the now-healed flesh of her throat. Opening her eyes, she saw the gaping door, the long dried red paint depicting the arcane spells that had kept him prisoner for so many years now.

"Stop…" she murmured. He raised his head. "Not here." She kissed him again, taking the lead this time and slipping her tongue between his lips, before wrenching herself away. "Not here…"

He glanced to the side, then nodded. "A fair point," he said, and stepped back, releasing her. "I want to get somewhere else… away from here."

---

"I need to drink soon," she commented as they ascended the stairs and emerged into one of the mansion's lower hallways. "You took quite a lot out of me."

"That was your own choice, police girl."

"I know… Hey," she shot him an irritated look. "It's been a long time since _anyone_ called me that, so don't you start again now."

Alucard only raised his eyebrows. "My apologies. An old habit. Seras, then."

"Actually… It's Victoria these days." He gave her a questioning look. "Without the Organisation to protect me, I had to function in the outside world on my own. I wasn't going to get very far with the identity of a woman confirmed dead, now was I?" He frowned. "But… You can still call me Seras, I suppose."

"Victoria…" He seemed to be pondering the new change, letting the name sit on his tongue for a moment. "Very well."

Seras shook her head absently, a small smile gracing her lips. "I think," she said. "We should get out of here."

"No…" Alucard answered. He took a few steps beyond her, and she stared after him in mild confusion.

"No?"

"My coffin," he explained.

---

"The bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame," Sera recited, her voice sounding somewhat vague. The words always evoked some sense of mystery in her. Her own coffin was a plain affair, and the least expensive she could get hold of, once things had calmed down. Still, it had served her well for many years now. "It's a beautiful object, you know," she commented.

Alucard nodded absently. "Everything seems to be here," he said, still scanning the small, dark room. Its contents were few, but the thick dust that covered them indicated that they had not been disturbed in a very long time.

"We can send someone to collect it and whatever else we need tomorrow night," Seras suggested. "Turns out it's a lot easier to find people who'll do fetch-and-carry type jobs like that with no questions asked these days."

After a pause, Alucard nodded. Then, as though at a loss as to what else to do, he sank into the single throne-like chair and sat, leaning forward, his chin supported by one hand.

"Master?" Seras moved towards him. Ever since he had come out of that cellar he had seemed strangely vacant. She remembered him being much more alert, and this new lethargy was beginning to make her uneasy. He appeared not to hear her, so she moved until she was standing directly in front of him. "Master, look at me." After a long hesitation, he looked up. "What's the matter? You're freaking me out here."

"When they took me down there again, I didn't even argue," he began. "I went willingly… So tell me: what now, Seras? _Victoria_?"

The blonde pursed her lips and frowned, before crouching at his feet, one hand on his knee. "Honestly?" she said. "I don't know. It's been ten years and I don't know. I've just been… surviving."

"So now you see," he said with the hint of a wry smile. "Eternity is more difficult than you might think. I'm surprised you lasted even this long."

"Huh. You always did underestimate me," she replied. "I'm tougher than I look."

"I know," he said. "But then, you are a blood relation of mine. I would expect nothing less than excellence."

"_Smug bastard,"_ Seras thought to herself.

"I heard that," Alucard commented, causing the girl to blush.

"You really haven't changed, have you?" she laughed. A pause, then, "But… why did you…?" She found she couldn't ask it. It didn't matter, he knew anyway.

"Why do you care?" he asked. "I thought you didn't want to be alone any more."

Seras was going to reply, but somehow the words simply wouldn't come, wouldn't assemble themselves into the right order. She knew that this was all the explanation she was going to get, at least for now. He tilted her chin up with one gloved finger and, leaning down, kissed her in an almost gentle manner, though it swiftly became more heated as she rose up on her knees and returned the kiss full force.

Without breaking that contact, the pair shifted so that Seras was no longer on the floor but was once again straddling her master's lap. She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and shifted her weight, grinning inwardly at the low groan this evoked. His hands slid from her waist over her hips, first gripping then sliding a fraction lower, to the bare skin between the fabric of her skirt and her stockings, and a second later and he was sliding the skirt upwards, hands moving underneath. A feline smile on her face, she broke away and began to lick possessively at the side of his neck, before kissing the same spot, letting the tips of her teeth just graze the skin.

"Are you going to bite me, Seras Victoria?" he asked, and the husky quality to his voice made Seras shiver.

"But… if I did that," the woman replied softly. "You wouldn't be my master any more…"

"That's true," he said. He moved so that he could look her in the eye. She felt a wave of vertigo, as though she could fall and drown in those eyes, like pools of blood. Then, moving so slowly, she lowered her head once more. Her lips touched his cold flesh and she licked tentatively, before testing his skin with the tips of her fangs. She closed her eyes, tightened her hold on him, and bit down.

---

A/N: Shorter this time, but even this is an achievement, as I wasn't planning on continuing this fic at all. If all goes well, however, there should be a third part after this.


	3. Immortal

_You'll swallow me till there is nothing left  
You'll follow me till the end, till the end…_

Everything had changed.

Even now, twelve years on, London still looked like a bombsite, derelict buildings and burnt out shells dotted in between the myriad building sites dedicated to restoring the city to how it had been before the war. Of course, construction work was always under-budget and behind-schedule, which meant that the view was likely to remain unchanged for a long time to come. Still, some semblance of a city had sprung up from the charred rubble, and the people had somehow managed to preserve the spirit of the place, if not the looks.

It was a lot quieter now. A serious post-war depression had meant that there were drastically fewer cars on the streets, and even those struggled to find roads enough to drive on that weren't clogged with pedestrians or broken masonry. Here and there tall spires and towers rose from the blackened huddle of buildings beneath, glaringly the glaringly modern, ambitious structures dwarfing the squat concrete blocks and casting their shadows over the city like great dead trees. Above the city, the sky threatened rain, and there was a chill in the air that cut to the bones.

"It's a perfect night," the woman breathed, casting her eyes upward. The sky was an inky blue, blotted with heavy black clouds and studded with diamond stars. The moon wore a blood red halo, its light not dulled by the hazy, artificial glow that the city produced. A cool breeze lifted her hair, and she closed her eyes and smiled. Somewhere down in the city a clock tower began to strike, the sound carrying curiously clearly on the evening air. Ten, eleven, twelve. The night was still young.

She stood on the roof's edge, balanced like a bird atop a tall, mirrored tower. She was silhouetted against the night sky, a solitary, silent figure observing the clamour and life of the city below, yet belonging more to the quiet shadows of the night above.

"A beautiful night," she murmured.

"So this is where you've been," came a deep voice behind her. She had been alone, but now as she glanced round she saw a familiar tall figure materialising, seemingly out of the darkness itself. She smiled as Alucard stepped forward, and she turned back to the view.

"I'm sorry," she said. When he snaked an arm around her waist she instinctively leaned back against his chest, bringing one hand to rest on his arm. "I was moon gazing."

Alucard loosely wrapped his other arm around her. "A night just like any other," he said.

"Maybe," she replied.

After a few moment's silence, he said, "Feel like a hunt?"

"Do we have a target?" she inquired, twisting in his arms so that she could look at his face.

He nodded, a hint of a smirk slinking onto his pale face. "Follow me." He began to dematerialise again, disintegrating into bats. She smiled a little. It had been slow business these past few weeks, with fewer and fewer targets popping up around the city. She had even resolved herself to going further abroad, even though the threat had always been most concentrated in London. She was glad that the world was becoming safer, though she couldn't deny that she was also happy for a little action every now and then. She had a gun slung over one shoulder on a leather strap, an old assault rifle, not the cannon she used to favour, and two handguns holstered on her belt, though she didn't truly need them. She just liked to be prepared these days.

He was almost completely gone before she gathered herself, cast one last glance at the red tinged moon, and began to follow.

---

Gunfire rattled in her ears, and she dodged out of the way just in time to avoid a string of bullets, which embedded themselves into the wall behind her in the place where her head had been moments before.

She sighed in irritation and completed reloading her gun, the hefty assault rifle, and then swiftly rolled behind some cover as her assailant began to shoot at her again.

"_Some cover would be nice_," she silently yelled at Alucard, their it coming as second nature to speak to him telepathically rather than vocally now. She felt him smile.

"_But you seem to be doing so well on your own,_" he replied. She shook her head, grit her teeth and hefted her weapon again, then jumping out from and over her cover and firing a short burst in her enemy's direction. She heard him curse, and did not even slow her stride as she ran toward where she knew he was hiding.

She was upon him before he could even finish reloading, and gave him only enough time to gasp in shock and fear before plunging her now clawed hand through his chest and destroying his heart, impaling him completely with her arm. She grimaced slightly as he turned to ash, his remains liberally sprinkling the pavement and her clothes.

"_Still three left,_" came Alucard's voice in her head again. "_One's running… Ha. You can take the coward, I'll deal with the other two._" Seras nodded grimly and slung her weapon over her shoulder on its strap.

"Don't worry. I can smell him. He won't get away from me."

As she dashed in the direction of her quarry's scent - easily identifiable, even amongst the myriad aromas of the nocturnal city, as the mingled signatures of death and fear - she heard shots from beyond a tall concrete building to her right, possibly flats. She could just imagine what kind of dingy halls and dark rooms those grey walls might house, and found herself all too happy to be leaving them, and this neighbourhood, behind.

Her target was fast, she'd give him that. His trail was already beginning to fade after only a few hundred metres. Growling in frustration, she ducked into a narrow alleyway and sprang onto a half collapsed green dumpster. Using the momentum from that leap, she jumped again, kicked off the crumbling brick wall and onto the fragile iron fire escape on the opposite wall. A few long strides brought her to the building's roof, from which she could nimbly jump the narrow gap between blocks. The roof was gently sloped, covered in rain slicked red tile, and slippery under her boots. With careful but swift steps she ran to the other side of the building and paused, scanning the streets below for a fleeing figure, while simultaneously smelling the air. It began to rain again, a miserable, grey drizzle, and his scent became even harder to pick up.

"_I'm finished with these maggots,_" Alucard informed her, his voice pushing into her head in a most unwelcome intrusion, interrupting her concentration. "_Don't tell me you haven't killed yours yet._"

"Give me a minute," she muttered, narrowing her eyes against the rain. The streets here were narrow, shady affairs, dotted with clusters of people and lone figures alike, most of them tottering home after a night's clubbing, she guessed, considering the time. She cast her gaze further, toward where the city started to become more populated, and where white and yellow neon lights glowed hazily through the gloomy weather. There. A lone figure, tiny from her vantage point, jostling its way through the milling late-night crowds with a sense of urgency that did not befit any honest night time wanderer. An unconscious grin slid onto her face, and she took two light steps back as a run up before launching herself with surprising grace onto the next roof, this one lower but further away.

It was easier to travel this way than to run through the roads themselves, as she would inevitably have attracted attention, especially at the speed she was going. This way, she could move almost like a shadow, her steps strangely quiet, her form shielded from the eyes of possible observers by shadow, and her elevated route afforded her an easy view of her quarry. He was slowing; perhaps he thought she had given up pursuit. Her grin widened, and her step quickened. Her boots slipped on the wet tiles, but her gait was fleet enough to prevent her from falling.

She was almost upon him. She could shoot him from here, but she didn't want to run the risk of someone getting in the way. This was an urban area, after all, and not as safe for battle as the deserted alleys and empty backstreets she had left behind.

She spied a narrow fenced in balcony on the first floor of a row of terraces a little way to the right and jumped. She landed on the corner of the railing and lost her balance for a moment, before throwing her arms out and managing to steady herself. Not giving herself time to falter again, she quickly sprinted the length of the rail and leapt.

These days, there were no facilities for containing un-dead threats to unpopulated areas, or for keeping such creatures secret from the press and the public. The Hellsing Organisation had done what it could, but since the war it had been both impossible and slightly pointless. There was no longer any such organisation, and so it was up to her to simply do whatever was necessary. It was a clean-up operation, of sorts, eliminating whatever strays and remnants had clung to existence following the last months of the war.

She landed in front of a group of people, her boots thumping heavily on the pavement before she was running again, within metres of her target. The bunch of drunken teens behind her cried out in inebriated confusion, but she paid them no heed. Ahead of her, the creature, pathetic wretch in possession of a pirated chip, heard the teens' alarmed voices and turned. His eyes widened in ill-concealed fear when he saw her advancing. Her handguns were holstered, the rifle still slung over her shoulder, but already one arm had begun to twist and form itself into a black claw, three long talons extending in a display of deadly efficient simplicity. In her line of work, guns were superfluous.

He didn't even have time to cry out before she had plunged her arm into his chest, sliding in up to the elbow, his bones cracking and snapping back, his flesh delightfully soft as she sliced through. It was moments like this, the moment of the kill, that she felt closest to her vampiric side. It was the only time when she could let that side of her come to the fore, and the rush of adrenaline it gave her was intoxicating. These were the only moments where she let herself be the monster she always knew she could become, if she wasn't careful. She was _so_ careful.

His eyes bulged slightly and his face froze into a grotesque mask of fear, before his entire body exploded into ash. The grey dust poured over her, some of it clinging to her clothes and sprinkling her face and hair, while the rest of it caught on the wind and was scattered to the air.

She paused for a few moments before turning around to face the onlookers, who simply gawked at her with a mixture of terror and confusion. Shakily, one of them raised a phone and snapped a picture of her. She winced at the flash and brought up a hand to shield her face. No doubt she would be on the news the next day, but she didn't really care. There wasn't much point to maintaining the secrecy the Hellsing Organisation had striven after considering the events of the last twelve years. Besides, no one would ever find her if she didn't want them to.

As she walked away, she reached out to Alucard with her mind. "_Target has been silenced… I need a drink. Meet me back at the mansion, okay?_"

"_Took you long enough,_" he replied. "_I'll see you soon._"

She sighed slightly and dusted off her clothes, brushing the dead monster's ashes off her. Ducking into a quieter side street, she closed her eyes and let her body dissolve into fog. It was the easiest and least conspicuous way to travel, aside from simply walking, which she really wasn't in the mood for. It was a long way back to the old Hellsing mansion, and she was still on a battle high. It would probably be a bad idea to surround herself with living humans; the temptation of their blood pulsing just beneath their skin might prove to be too much. She needed blood, and she needed to let off a little steam, so heading straight back the mansion was the best thing he could do. There would be a fresh blood pack just waiting for her, as well as the vampire she now shared her existence with. Before she faded into shadows completely, a slow grin slipped onto her face.

---

"Yes sir," she breathed, her lips brushing softly over his throat, her eyes fluttering shut. The events of the night's hunt had already been forgotten. "My master…" He wound the fingers of one hand into her hair and forced her head up, biting at her lower lip. She only laughed at this reaction, a slow chuckle from somewhere deep in her chest. Catching his mouth in another slow, deep kiss, she slid her hands up over his chest, his shoulders, and up to twine in his coiling hair. At the same time, she arched her body upward, pressing her hips against his and earning a low groan as he moved one hand to her thigh, pulling her leg up. She responded by wrapping both of her long legs around his hips and adopting a slow rocking motion which he swiftly matched.

She broke the kiss by abruptly turning her head, and he immediately moved his attention to her neck, kissing and biting his way to her collarbone, pausing to pull at the buttons of her shirt. Propping herself up on one elbow, she aided him by deftly unfastening the unhelpful garment, though she didn't let him proceed any further as she guided his head up again instead, kissing him with greater urgency this time. He leaned on one hand and used the other to push Seras' skirt up, his movements impatient and insistent. Breaking the kiss just barely, his lips still brushing hers, Alucard growled, "I am not your master any more."

"No," Seras sighed. She kissed the corner of his mouth, his jaw line, the side of his neck, letting her pointed teeth rake over his pale skin. "You will always be…" She arched her back as he impatiently pushed her back onto the bed, one hand roughly caressing her breast, the other slipping between her legs, his kisses teasing her throat and chest. She gasped a little, and forced the words out between halting, needless breaths, "my master."

---

It was a night like any other. The sky was clear with the promise of morning frost, the stars still bright beyond the haze of smog and vague light thrown forth by the city, the moon partially obscured by a wisp of indigo cloud. Seras Victoria sat atop the Hellsing mansion, one leg drawn up to her chest, the other dangling over the edge, gazing out into the evening and letting her thoughts wander.

The world had changed. It had changed, and she had been afraid of being left behind. She knew that he had too, though he would never say it. In a sense it was true that they were anachronisms, possibly the last 'true' vampires left in the world; they were creatures left over from another time, a time of fairytale creatures and monsters under the bed. Names had changed, and even places appeared altered. London was not what it once was, and she was now known to the living world as Victoria Sears.

Still, she thought, rising to her feet and hooking her gun's strap over her shoulder, she would always be Seras Victoria to the only person who actually mattered. She smiled to herself. It was a night like any other; a perfect night. Time passed, names changed, places appeared altered, but Seras knew that underneath, things never really changed at all.

---


End file.
